![]() ![]() To prevent the piece from sounding weaker and less confident as you get to the end, some teachers recommend starting at the song's end and working back to the beginning. All this does is reinforce your mistakes." In the early stage of learning a new piece, you must practice slowly and "hesitate, rather than err" so that you don't make mistakes. Violist Molly Gebrian says in one of her excellent publications on practicing that "the WORST possible way to practice is to play from the beginning, play until you make a mistake and then either fix the mistake once and go on, or start over. However, you must be careful how you proceed. If it's a fugue, you certainly want to start at the beginning so that you understand what the subject and countersubject are. If you started at the beginning of the composition, you would learn the melody or the primary and secondary themes, which the composer will probably develop later. On Wednesday, start with page 3, etc.īut the beginning can be a logical place to start as long as you're disciplined enough to focus your attention evenly throughout the piece later on. One way to minimize that problem, especially if it is a lengthy piece, is to get through page 1 on Monday, but on Tuesday, start with page 2. ![]() And more importantly, the playing quality at the end never catches up with that at the beginning. The result is that the beginning parts of the composition sound great, but the performance gradually deteriorates toward the end. But some players get so caught up playing the fun, enjoyable parts that they neglect the rest of the song. ![]() Yes, the familiar, catchy material is often at the beginning and is fun to play. But that is not always the most efficient choice. Your first thought might be to begin at the beginning. Okay, so where do we start? Here are three possibilities. In music, good practice habits using the proper tools enable us to feel good about our work and our playing and save us hours of frustration and work fixing things we should have learned correctly in the beginning. Inadequate foundations will inevitably cause costly problems. The foundations can take a long time to prepare in the building process, but no builder worthy of his reputation would stint on this crucial stage. Piano pedagogue Graham Fitch points out that when an architect or engineer designs a building, he gives as much consideration to the parts you do not see, especially the foundations, as to the visible edifice. Instead, we must take one step at a time and take enjoyment in mastering the elements that make up the whole." It takes discipline and patience to deny ourselves the immediate gratification of playing through the piece over and over (which actually produces a tremendous amount of damage to future precision and accuracy). And no one is going to be there to stop us. So we want to speed up the process, skip steps, and jump right into playing the piece. We want to play music, and we want to play it now.
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